The infinite wonders of networking...
Submitted by Fedule on September 17, 2004 - 3:58pm
So I got me a new laptop today, m'yesh?
Now I'm trying to make them play Airburst Extreme over a LAN. Now, things don't like working.
Eventually, I figured out that the Firewall may have been causing problems, so I opened the necessary port, and now I find that I can join a game hosted on my desktop from my laptop but not vice versa. I know for a fact that I entered in all the details correctly (IP address, port no, etc) as I double, triple and quad checked them to make absolutely sure I wasn't making some stupid mistake.
So does anyone have ANY idea what could be causing this?
It sounds like you've got NAT
It sounds like you've got NAT routing going on somewhere between the Macs. NAT's normally on a broadband or cable router to let you split your single IP address asigned by your ISP between all your computers, but it wrecks UDP messaging (which ABE and a lot of other games use).
Generally though, on a local network, the NAT on the router shouldn't be getting in the way and it could just be down to how you've got your network set up (are you using manual IP addresses or DHCP for instance ?)
One of the last few bits we added to the network mode before we finished ABE was that when you're setting up the server, it should show its IP address on the page (so you can enter it into the other Macs' 'server IP' field). If this is different from what you expect the server address to be, something strange is going on
Far as I know, the IP address
Far as I know, the IP addresses are fine. I do recall the phrase "DHCP" from somewhere in my setup process, better enquire as to that...
No, I don't think NAT is responsible. The computers all have seperate IP addresses, and like I said, I was able to run a network game perfectly one way but not the other. Maybe I'll sleep on it...